Are you fed up yet?

There are a lot more people who need work in this country than there are jobs, yet some of the jobs pay enough to employ hundreds of people, comfortably; All across the country, people are realizing that they will never see any equity in their home, because the mortgage is worth so much more than the house is; So many people are afraid of losing even a tiny percentage of their wealth that they are completely blocking any attempt to even begin the process of controlling greenhouse gas emissions; The same greed has been applied to health care, where attempts to provide universal coverage have been seen as leading to cuts in the profitability of the health insurance industry;

Greed is pushing this country to the brink, pushing us over, and then throwing rocks at us as we fall. What is going to happen when a bunch of homeowners who are underwater on their mortgages decide to walk away from the joke they used to call an investment? Are we willing to push the health care system to complete collapse to avoid addressing the costs insurance add to it? Are we willing to make people hungry, homeless, and armed? The amount of bonuses that will be paid to the small contingent of Chase employees would cover the entire shortfall my state is looking at in the next year. There is a disconnect here, as if there were different realities for people who are wealthy.

“I don’t have to work. My money works for me.” This is the answer I am sure many Americans would to give to the question “What do you do for a living?” “What kind of work does your money do?” I would ask, “Ponzi schemes? Collateralized debt obligations? Or have you invested in the health insurance industry?”

To work means to create wealth. But there seems to be different kinds of wealth these days. I can remember when wealth was things, buildings, roads, railroads, airplanes, that kind of stuff. But now we think of wealth as the value of a stock, or the size of an account in a computer.

I think that people are getting angry, and that they are not going take too much more. But I don’t think that they are going to march in the streets, or bomb buildings, or anything like that. I think that they are just going give up, to sit down and say “I don’t know what to next.” They have followed the rules, and have gotten burned, badly. They have steadily lost everything that was important to them, as money has become the be-all and end-all in this country. Greed has destroyed their savings, made the homes that they thought they were investing in worth less than the mortgage that they signed a few years ago, and shriveled their pay so that they are earning less than they were.